DON’T SHOOT, G-MAN! Infamous is somewhere between a joyride and a reckoning.

Infamous | By Ace Atkins | Putnam | 416 pages | $25.95

Ace Atkins’s new novel is what the movie Public Enemies should have been. In his telling of the John Dillinger saga, director Michael Mann seemed so afraid of letting some disreputable excitement into his meticulous Depression-era re-creations, you could be excused for thinking he’d given up filmmaking for embalming.

You don’t venture a novel like Infamous, the (somewhat true) story of George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his hand in the botched kidnapping of Oklahoma oil magnate Charles Urschel, unless you’re willing to indulge your audience in some of the juice and flash you find in movies and legends about ’30s gangsters. The characters in Infamous, particularly Kelly and his spectacularly scheming wife, Kathryn, are a few rungs up the ladder from their hayseed backgrounds, but not yet the slick operators they fancy themselves. George in particular is an affable mug, as happy reading the funnies in his underwear as he is stepping out at a nightspot. In his marriage, he’s the turkey and Kathryn is the ax. She loves George, in her way. But you also get the feeling that the man hasn’t been born who can stymie her ambition. In the world of Infamous she’s an LMILF — the Lady Macbeth you’d like to . . .

Atkins doesn’t exactly let it rip in Infamous. A former crime reporter (he was nominated for a Pulitzer in 2001), he’s concerned with getting the story right. (Among his sources here is the reporting done on the Urschel kidnapping by papers in Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Memphis.) That concern has characterized the three novels that preceded Infamous — retellings of the Fatty Arbuckle trial, the ’50s conflagration in the notorious Alabama sinpot Phenix City, and the 1955 murder of Tampa crime boss Charlie Wall.

But Atkins loves legend and iconography. His first four novels — featuring the blues-scholar sleuth Nick Travers — were canny tales in which death alone could not hold the spirits of Robert Johnson and James Carr from stalking the land, and in which a crazed killer, who may have been Elvis’s dead twin Jesse Garon, roamed Louisiana like a peckerwood Grim Reaper.

Infamous is somewhere between a joyride and a reckoning. You know George isn’t smart enough to avoid what’s coming. Atkins plays his good-natured criminality against the surefooted movement of the feds. And it’s there that you can feel the influence of two books Atkins admires, Elmore Leonard’s The Hot Kid and Up in Honey’s Room.

The Leonard novels read like an old master’s unsentimental return to the stories and images that obsessed him from boyhood. There’s no comparable nostalgia in Atkins’s book, but there is a shared fascination with the past. And maybe more of the past than Atkins realizes. His good guy here — Gus Jones, an agent in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, then beginning its consolidation of power — has a background as a Texas Ranger. When Gus takes center stage, you feel the presence of the final days of the American West, with its sense of rough justice, giving way to the bureaucratic mechanisms that will take over as the century progresses. He’s a cross between the taciturn upright Western hero and the clean-cut, straight-arrow G Man. And part of the character’s appeal is that he doesn’t quite believe in Hoover’s eagle-eyed oversight. Gus is too smart to feel he’s got anything in common with the criminals he’s after. But Atkins lets you sense their mutual respect for raising hell, and the dulling order that, like prosperity, is just around the corner.

Ghost stories For all of the excitement that surrounded Wilco on the Maine State Pier or Sufjan Stevens at Port City Music Hall or the various sold-out Ray LaMontagne shows of the past year, there is no question that last Sunday's Phish show at the Cumberland County Civic Center was the biggest thing to hit our fair city in a very long time.

Wanting more After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.

Two sides of life "I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist," the Pop artist Andy Warhol wrote in 1975. "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

2009: The year in dance You could say there were two tremendous forces that propelled dance into the world of modern culture: the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev and the choreography of Merce Cunningham.

Hearts and souls (and laughs too) It's been a good year for theater around here — an ingeniously roasted dramatic chestnut here, a new and safely landed flight of fancy there. Below are 10 productions that particularly stood out.

Big starts I kick off my highlights of 2009 with praise for a theater company that has just finished its inaugural season: The Legacy Theater Company, founded by former City Theater artistic director Steve Burnette.

KATE BEYOND TIME: THE KATE MOSS BOOK | January 08, 2013 Almost all models who achieve some degree of fame find themselves blamed for whatever agenda their era's most vocal scold happens to be pushing.

INTERVIEW: NINA HOSS ON BARBARA | December 18, 2012 Quietly over the last 11 years, one of the strongest collaborations in contemporary cinema has been developing between the German director Christian Petzold and the actress he often chooses to star in his films, Nina Hoss. Petzold and Hoss's latest collaboration, Barbara , is their richest and finest film.

SLIDESHOW: THE CHEAP NEAR-THRILLS OF SEXYTIME | December 14, 2012 With porn so privately accessible now, we don't worry about the stigma attached to its consumption, the thought of someone pausing to peruse the art in front of an adult movie theater (hell, the thought of an adult movie theater) instead of just ducking in before being seen is almost touching.

BUNNY YEAGER’S NAKED AMBITION | October 05, 2012 Pin-up photography has served so many purposes — outlet for male desire; outlet for feminist ire; retro kitsch emblem — that it has barely been talked about as photography.